PEOPLE WITHOUT A COUNTRY: BRAZILIAN SETTLERS CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

In 1974, Mario Simoes Alves quit work on his rented coffee farm in southern Brazil, packed his belongings and went looking for a better life in Paraguay.

Land there, along the Brazilian border, was fertile, plentiful and cheap. For the cost of five acres in Brazil you could get 20 in Paraguay, he remembers.

And Paraguay's government was eager for Brazilian settlers. Guerrillas opposed to then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner lurked in the frontier forests, and Stroessner was eager to have the land cleared and settled by friendlier peasants. Brazilian farming technology and capital also were needed in a rough nation short on both.

"They wanted to open up the country," remembers Alves, now 42, who quickly found 60 acres of land to work with his wife, father and brothers, who also made the move.

They cut the trees that covered the farm, dug out the stumps, built roads and houses and planted coffee, rice and soybeans. Alves fathered eight children, who grew up learning Spanish in school.

"It was a good life," he remembers. "There was nothing better than living there."

But by 1990 the good life for the Brasiguaios, as the Brazilian settlers were known, had come to an end. Rich Paraguayans, friends of Stroessner, were hungrily eyeing the newly cleared and productive land on the border. Soon, Alves and his family were being harassed by Paraguayan police because they had no Paraguayan identification cards.

When the Brazilian settlers finished paying their mortgages and went to get title to their land, they found that all record of their ownership had vanished. Some families, who had gotten free land from the Paraguayan government, found their grants had been rescinded by the federal land agency.

"Frequently there was a change of power, and the new person would annul everything the previous person had done," said Cassia Gomez, a Brazilian journalist who has written a book on the beleaguered Brasiguaios.

Finally, in May 1992, Alves and his family fled Paraguay, lacking the $1,500 Paraguayan authorities had demanded to provide them with identity cards. They joined a mass exodus of at least 250,000 of the estimated 500,000 Brazilians who had gone to Paraguay in the '70s.

"We left before we were thrown out," Alves says.

"We had to legalize or be expelled. The laws were heavy."

Today, nearly half a decade later, they and thousands of other Brasiguaio families find themselves nationless refugees stuck on the border, no longer Paraguayan but not quite Brazilian either.

Most have long lost any Brazilian citizenship papers, if they ever had them. Without the papers, their children cannot go to school or get medical care in Brazil and they cannot buy land.

"There's a whole generation that can't prove they're Brazilian or Paraguayan," Gomez said. "There's a national identity crisis in the area. I've seen camps where when they run up the Brazilian flag people start singing the national anthem of Paraguay."

Many of the refugees have given up the dream of owning land and gone to work as farmhands in Brazil or Paraguay. But an estimated 2,000 remain camped on the border on the outskirts of towns like Amambai, hoping for free government land and a second chance.

"These people were definitely cheated," said Maucir Pauletti, a lawyer for Brazil's Indigenous Missionary Council, or CIMI, in Mato Grosso do Sul state, where most of the Brasiguaios live.

The refugees survive in huts built of black plastic over scrap lumber. White feed sacks, cut open and nailed up, serve as interior walls. Chickens scratch in dirt-floor doorways and dusty children--many with the green eyes and blond hair of their German and Italian ancestors who settled southern Brazil--play with homemade toys made of tins cans and wire.

The camp at Amambai, built on five isolated acres donated by the state government, has one water tap for 52 families. Laundry hangs on barbed-wire clotheslines and the stench from pit toilets hangs in the air.

"It hasn't been easy to take. But we're obliged to take it. There's no place to go," says Alves.

Nobody pays much attention to the refugees except at election time, when politicians from both sides of the border court their votes and provide transportation to shuttle them to polling places.

But Alves is confident the wait for land will pay off. Brazil's government has promised to settle 100,000 homeless families on new land by 1998. The fact that there are 4.8 million families waiting doesn't dim his hopes.